Hard Promises
by tellmeastoryplease
Summary: Mary nurses Matthew after his life-altering injuries. Rated M for dark subject matter and a few swears. AU after season 2, episode 5. SPOILERS up until then, obviously.
1. Chapter 1

Hard Promises,

Chapter 1

Mary supposed she would have to start going to church now. After all, in the strictest sense, her prayers had been answered. He was back, and he was safe. And she must hold up her end of the bargain.

"_I __beg __of __you, __if __I__'__ve __ever __done __anything __good, __please __keep __him __safe.__"_ Those _were_ her words, and she must honor them now.

Still, watching him lie in his narrow bed, day after day, not smiling, barely talking, and scarcely eating, she couldn't help but feel that she'd entered into a contract without thoroughly reading the terms of agreement. Yes, Matthew was back from the war and alive, but he was miserable. Anyone could see that, and anyone could understand why.

He was a cripple. Even saying the words, silently to herself, they sounded barbed, as if she was being purposefully cruel, but she wasn't. She was simply stating the truth. Matthew was crippled. For the rest of his life. There was to be no negotiation. She knew that, and he knew it, too. She saw the understanding wash over him when she told him that day, fidgeting nervously, wondering where Dr. bloody Clarkson was, and then inanely offering to make them both some tea so she'd had an excuse to run upstairs to her room and cry into her duvet.

He'd cried too, which was how she knew he knew, had really understood the gravity of what she'd tried to tell him in the most elliptical way possible. Matthew _was_always clever.

Which was why he needed her, she'd decided. He was too smart to take this strange half-punishment, half-reprieve easily. She would have to do it for him, show him how to plow forward with constancy and tolerance, even though she hardly knew how herself. Still, she would learn, and she would teach him.

And so, since that day last week, she'd attended to him, swapping shifts with Sybil and then adding his mother, Isobel, into the rotation once she'd finally been able to make her way home from Paris. He mostly slept—the morphine made sure of that—but he still needed near-constant care: dressings replaced, wounds cleaned, bedpans changed, meals delivered, and perhaps most of all, company provided, lest he do something rash.

The trained nurses were stretched too thin to devote that much attention to just one man. This, she'd told Dr. Clarkson firmly, was what she could do. She couldn't nurse anyone, the way Sybil and Isobel could, but she could nurse him, and that was to be the end of it.

Of course, it hadn't been then end of it. There had been increasingly frustrated and impassioned protestations from Dr. Clarkson over the course of the next few days, but, honestly, Mary never doubted her eventual victory. He might have some extra patches on his jacket these days but this was her house and her family and she'd be damned if anyone prevented her from acting as she saw fit. Isobel, Sybil, and, most importantly, her mother and grandmother, concurred. Poor man. If he wasn't so insufferable, she'd have felt sorry for him.

It was during a night shift on the tenth day since his delivery—or deliverance, depending on one's perspective—that he finally turned to her out of what she'd thought was a deep sleep and said, "You have to help me die."


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

She was here again. She was always here, more often than even mother. He'd gotten to the point where he could tell by sound and scent who was acting as sentry by his bedside, and even without opening his eyes he knew he'd find Mary's angular frame jutting out of the chair, her raven head bowed in a book.

He'd never had a very good nose for scents—the nice ones all smelled alike to him—but Mary's had something piquant to it that he'd never smelled elsewhere, some underlying sharpness, that always gave her away. At first, he'd thought it yet another affectation of a haughty, spoiled heiress, surely the result of some perfume imported from the Orient or perhaps Africa, and worn in an attempt at exotic sophistication. He'd scoffed at her pretentiousness during those early days. Yes, she was privileged, but she was an English girl through and through. No amount of perfume, feathery headdresses, and flirting with effeminate Turkish gentlemen was going to change that. Yorkshire and London were the boundaries of her map. At least he—the dreaded middle-class solicitor from Manchester—had been to the Continent and university.

And then, one day in the village, he'd bumped into Anna coming out of the post office, a tower of packages teetering in her small arms. Oh, the poor, good woman, he'd thought, as he gallantly relieved her of the heaviest ones and fell in step with her toward Downton.

"Thank you, Mr. Crawley," she'd bobbed. "I'm afraid I should have brought a basket with me, but I wasn't expecting there to be so much."

"Anything good?" he'd asked with a great deal more cheek than was probably wise. Though kind-hearted, Anna was still Mary's lady's maid, and, as such, a likely conduit of gossip. He really must learn to be more circumspect. That he had asked such an intimate and impertinent question would no doubt confirm everyone's worst opinions of him.

"Just some things come from London for Lady Mary. Lotions, perfumes, and such," she explained succinctly, obviously just as wary in his company.

He nodded and smiled. Why must every interaction in this little village carry such weight, he wondered? How much longer was he to be the alien among them? He was merely trying to perform a simple kindness.

His frustration must have shown because Anna seemed to take pity on him.

"Last time they were delivered to the house, we opened the package and found most of the bottles broken. It was a horrible mess and ruined one of Lady Mary's favorite evening gowns. She was not pleased," she finished with a conspiratorial smile.

"No, I can imagine."

"She's been without any for the past month, so she's eager to have to have her supplies replenished, I dare say. I've been entrusted with their safe transport."

They were rounding the bend now, up out of the village, Downton's gothic spires beginning to spike over the hill. Anna's voice seemed far off now as he tried to project himself 10 or 20 years into the future, strolling these grounds—_his_grounds—perhaps with his wife and children by his side. And once again, he had to remind himself to feel proprietary about it all. This would be his _home_.

"After all, what's a proper English lady without her lavender rose water?" Anna continued benignly.

It was then that Matthew actually heard her.

"Mary wears lavender rose water perfume?" he asked, actually stopping in his tracks as his brain wrestled with the logic.

"Yes, sir," Anna said, appropriately perplexed.

"Ah," he said recovering and once more pressing forward.

"Perhaps it was indiscreet of me to say, sir," she fretted. "Please don't say anything. A lady is entitled to her beauty secrets."

"Ah, quite right," he'd replied magnanimously.

That was when the first cracks in her façade had become evident to him. Perhaps, he'd finally realized, that waft of candied spice she carried with her wasn't her perfume. Perhaps that was just _her_. And that she'd been trying and failing to cover it up with English rosewater or whatever all these years sent a pang through his heart. What a strange thing that she should be human, after all, he'd thought to himself that day on the road.

Over time, he came to crave that smell, of course; it's pungency in direct correlation to her proximity, which was what he really coveted. At the height of his ardor, he felt like a penniless drunk sniffing empty pint bottles for a cheap buzz.

That was all ancient history though. Not merely his dream of a life with Mary—that had been destroyed even before the war—but his dream of any sort of sensual life. There was no room left for luxuries like smell, and taste, and touch now. His was to be a life of routine and maintenance: sit up; lie down; eat this; take that; sleep now; shit here; wash that. He was to be cultivated like some delicate hothouse flower under a bell jar, poked, prodded, and fussed over lest he receive the slightest ill wind and wilt dead away. The worst part was that they were absolutely right. He _was_ fragile. He would wilt dead away.

So, after 10 days and nights back at Downton, the booming of the trenches still ringing in his ears, he'd made a decision. He had been a man of action all his life, this was to be his last great act, but he would need some help. Mother was out of the question. Lavinia was too much of a frightened woodland creature. Sybil was too good. He needed someone tough, someone contrary, someone who would understand how much the surface sheen of life mattered and how bereft we were without it.

When he heard her heels click down the aisle and then inhaled the familiar scent—the flowery bouquet of lavender rose water on top and the sharp, peppery musk underneath—he knew she'd understand. So he waited for her to settle, lifted his eyelids, and spoke.


	3. Chapter 3

_A/N: Hi! I forgot to include one of these thingies at the beginning, so I'm doing it now. I do not own Downton Abbey or these characters. If I did, I'd be rich—and I'm really, really not rich. This is just me trying to correct what I felt were some deficiencies in Series 2's treatment of Matthew's injury and recovery. _

_Also, many thanks to all those who've read and/or favorited this story. I'm sorry I haven't updated in a while. Work, the holidays, family, and life have gotten in the way, but I'm going to try to be more faithful going forward. Comments are welcome!_

Chapter 3

Later in her life, Mary would sometimes revisit this moment, substituting myriad infinitely more eloquent and compassionate responses for the strangled gasp that actually left her throat in reaction.

"Good God, Matthew! No!" were the words she managed.

She stared at him appraisingly waiting for more words to come. What was happening in his head, she couldn't tell. He'd always seemed transparent to her. That was part of the attraction, she'd eventually realized. Whereas she was deliberately opaque, cagey, and circumspect, he was always bright and clear, as if he was animated not by blood, sinew, and the grinding of muscle against bone, but by zephyrs and mountain springs: nature itself.

And like those poetic mountain springs, she could always see straight to the bottom of him. It was what had irked her so much about him in the early days. He was so bloody earnest about everything and acted as if hard work, a clear conscious, and honest intentions were all that were needed to make one's way in the world. How much she'd envied his naïveté. How furious it had made her to see him rewarded for it with her family's money, land, title, and status.

But of course, for some, it is easy. That Matthew was one of them and she was not was hardly his fault. Her quarrel was with something much larger than him, and once she was able to admit that, she found herself also admitting that he was actually quite endearing, puppyish even. She half expected him to wag his tale whenever she walked in to a room so naked was his enthusiasm for her company. He really did want to please her, and that he could was a source of wonder for them both.

That was gone now. He was murky, impenetrable. In the moonlight, he looked cool and blue like a corpse, his icy eyes focusing on the middle-distance above his bed. He was so calm. That was the very, very worst part.

"I know how it sounds, and I'm sorry to make you uncomfortable, but I've given this a great deal of thought, and I just can't do it," he said in the steady voice one uses when dictating a telegram.

"I just . . . don't see any way forward like this." The words caught in his throat and his voice was thick like he was trying to swallow a particularly bulky piece of bread. All at once, Mary understood. Oh, his impassivity was not stoicism. It was self-defense. He only appeared calm and still because he was coming undone, rotting from the inside.

In a flash of blue-grey cotton, she dropped to her knees beside the bed gripping his hand that still bore trench dirt under the nails.

"Matthew . . . Matthew, Matthew!" she repeated until he finally looked at her, properly taking in her pinched brow and frantic gaze. She looked wild, disturbed, as if she were the one on the verge of offing herself, and he suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to laugh. He'd experienced this before in the trenches. When things got about as bad as they could get and then kept getting worse everything became funny, and the men used to roar with laughter over their stupid bad luck. It was the absurdity of it, Matthew thought. Here they were: tailors, factory workers, farmers, middle-class lawyers from Manchester, and, worst of all, schoolboys who hadn't even had the chance to become anything yet, weaving daily through a foul, putrid, ugly, system of dirt ditches in the French countryside fighting an enemy they hardly ever saw for a reason that, most of the time, escaped comprehension. How did it ever come to this?

And now, here he was again, on the edge of a new absurdity: lying crippled on a cot in the grand house he was to inherit with his long-elusive, dark-eyed cousin crumpled in a heap by his bedside quaking with terror because he'd asked her to kill him. Surely this, this gaping discrepancy between the life he'd envisioned for himself and life he was now living, deserved none of his fear or meekness. The _fucking audacity_ of the betrayal deserved only to be stared at squarely in the face and laughed at.

"Ha!" he barked at her.

She rocked back, stunned. This just made him laugh harder. He had scared her, he realized. Lady Mary Crawley was scared. Well, welcome to the club, he thought and continued spraying the room with his mirthless staccato barrage. After weeks of being talked about as is he wasn't there, prodded like a pincushion, and wheeled to and fro, he finally had someone's full attention. All it had taken was for him to go completely crazy! It was so easy! Why hadn't he done this before! So consumed was he with this sudden, small ration of control that he did not notice the other men stirring in their beds, raising their heavy heads, and squinting groggily. Nor did he notice Mary's trembling form rise from the floor with her eyes lit with fury. He certainly didn't see the tiny but dense fist dropping out of the air like a German shell.

Then all was black again.


End file.
